Adding to my wish list at pace here. I need to stop doing that; I've just been going through bookshelves and I've got enough unread books to keep me going for years, even allowing for keeping up my current reading pace.
107 The Woman In Me by Britney Spears
This is on the flimsy side as far as memoirs go. Without being a huge Britney fan, I was aware of almost everything she recounts in this book, with a few bitchy exceptions (she’s got a particularly scathing account of Justin Timberlake in New York). And for all that she is candid about her experiences during her conservatorship, it’s strangely remote and a bit disconnected from what I expect was very real pain during that time. I suspect this book is more for Britney than for us, and is a way of putting some distance between her past and her future. I hope she finds a way to be happy now she’s got the freedom to make choices again.
108 A Helping Hand by Celia Dale
This was brutal. A dark domestic drama from the 1960s about a couple who take an elderly lady into their home. It’s clear early on that all is not as it should be, but their growing control and manipulation of their guest, and their treatment of their Italian lodger is deeply unsettling. It’s a gripping read, told with lightness and menace at the same time. The end was entirely unexpected and genuinely shocking. Would highly recommend if kitchen sink drama noir is your thing. And even if it isn’t.
109 The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible by Melvyn Bragg
I love Melvyn Bragg’s work (on which note, for fans of Julian of Norwich, there’s a recent In Our Time about her which I thought was great) so I had high hopes for this. It tells the story of the way in which the King James translation came to be, setting it in the context of the religious conflict in the preceding decades, and how it was then used by migrants to the US and throughout the British Empire, as well as in the United Kingdom, to influence culture, art and politics. It’s detailed and opinionated and although at times it felt somewhat digressive and oddly structured, I did learn a lot.
110 The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith
No one needs me to summarise this but I’d say that despite its obvious faults, it was light years ahead of the previous one, and obviously after the ending I will be showing up for the next instalment. The gap between starting to write and publication is starting to show – the need to keep the Robin and Strike narrative going means she can’t just pick up a few years later, so this is set around the time of the Brexit referendum which felt completely unnecessary as a plot line. Just untether it from real time and tell us some stories with some evil people meeting their comeuppance.
111 The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren
I reviewed this upthread. Was hilarious froth. Loved it.
112 Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff
The New York Times said this was a “radically feel-good story about the murder of no-good husbands by a cast of unsinkable women”. I’m not sure about “radically feel-good”; the entrenched and crushing misogyny and social oppression of the caste system in India where the story is set didn’t make me feel great but there were moments when I did indeed cheer the unsinkable women, who bitch, back stab and backtrack while trying to dispose of their awful men in various different ways. I liked this, but didn’t love it.
113 I’m Sorry You Feel Like That by Rebecca Wait
I do love a well told saga of dysfunctional family relationships and this had humour and sadness. Alice and Hanna are twins, but that’s all they have in common. Their father, who left their mother for another woman, is dead, and their brother is insufferable. Their aunt has just died and they meet for the first time in five years at her funeral. The story of the family is told through a series of flashbacks and we learn more about each of them over the course of the book. There’s a lot of empathy for all the characters here, with a couple of notable exceptions, and the way in which their stories develop mean our sympathies are always shifting. The joy of this for me was in the detail – the way in which Hanna meets Dan felt like a really believable meet-cute, while his ultimate betrayal of her felt suitably banal.